The big boys headed home in July. I was not sure they believed that I would get them there, but I did. We flew the red eye in Ft Lauderdale and arrived in Little Haiti through rush hour traffic. J told me to lay down on the couch and take a nap.

Nope. The mango tree outside dwarfed the house in ripe fruit. The rats eat well.

We drove to see the boys' relatives on the north side of town. We drove down to the water to eat dinner. They did not look back when I drove away the next day. They were home and I was not and all was well.

The kids were deep into track. Manny has (unsurprisingly) a terrific arm and takes direction from everyone other than me, really, really well. We queued up shot put on YouTube and the big boys watched the Olympic relay trials. Sam practiced with blocks in the park in the mornings and on the track at night. I walked the track in defiance of my own waistline. The boys finished summer school. Manny was tall enough to go to the pool unaccompanied by anyone other than his brothers and took agency of his own pool pass. We lived an idyllic urban existence of home canning, long jump practice, evening swims, and parties in the park. Of course, the emotional toll of brothers coming and going did not go unnoticed and I braced myself for the empty spaces.

We drove to Sacramento to watch Manny and Sam compete in the Junior Olympics. The nerves and heat made for a particularly combustible combination. Once home, Truly would panic and start crying every time she got a little overheated walking on the sidewalk. The 110 degree heat had made an impression.

Paul works from home now and this was his first summer to do so-- his giant screen and humming electronics heated up his tiny corner. We dragged window units from the basement and installed them strategically around the house. The sisters had not opted for such luxury. The GCFI circuits tripped when they kicked on in the evenings. I peeled off flakes of straw bale and jammed in compost between the layers, trying to get my anemic beds to break down and produce fruit. It worked. We grew tomatoes and beans and one perfect cantaloupe, 6 jalapeno peppers, and two bell peppers. I put in three blueberry bushes and marked out a future patio.

I'm trying to gather my thoughts on Summer. Summer was complicated. Let me tell you about this week.

I have extraordinarily kind people in my life. Their generosity is not a lens through which they run their decisions, but something that is built into all the decisions that they make. It is no surprise, then, that people show up for us and our community in generous and kind ways. This world is a terrible place. I can hardly breathe to think of what is happening oceans away. I can hardly breathe thinking of the fear and heartache so many people wrap themselves up in. But equally extraordinary is the palpable urgency that people are placing on kindness right now-- the way in which they are throwing it into the air with abandon, willing their dollars, their time, and their energy to something greater.

Do you feel it? Maybe there is a better word. I put out a call this week for gift cards to send home with our school families who regularly receive weekend food support through our building. A friend from across town called right away, "I feel sort of helpless in this season... here is how I can meet an immediate need". Someone needs shoe sizes 1 and 2? I'll stop by the store on the way home. Coats, you say? Let me look in our closet. Aleppo? Let us give and give until it hurts. I am often guilty of counting the cost of my own kindness. This comes from a few places: being hurt, feeling scammed, feeling like I do not have enough, wondering what makes a difference. I try to calculate maximum effectiveness. Growing up, we spoke in the language of "stewardship", or the careful managing of resources both in saving and giving. Poor stewardship paved the road to hell. Our wealth was not of this world, but squandering any of that cold, hard cash came with it's own ramifications. That spirit lives on. I'm breaking myself of it.

My parents taught me to give with an open hand. They loaned money to friends and sometimes relative strangers, hoping but never counting on being repaid. I do not think this is the way that they were raised, but something that grew in them over time. They taught us to give sacrificially. One such "sacrifice" came when my dad marched into our room and dug through the box of chocolates we had been given by our family friends at Christmas. He poured out the top layers into a Tupperware bowl as we protested. He was heading to the juvenile detention center to play floor hockey with the bs there, and wanted to bring them a treat. We yelled. He did not relent.

It was a small thing. It was not a small thing.

I was (again) explaining Intent versus Impact to a car full of my children this week. We are trying to ground them in the fact that Intent doesn't really matter that much, only Impact. I cried when I got home.

I am wound tight with intent. What is my Impact?

****

I have done no baking and we opted for a garland over a tree (so help me if another body-sized thing sets up in this house and then sheds all over the damn place). We are beginning to feel the grief of the holiday-away-from-family from our children. Unfortunately, the language of their grief looks like rage and frustration. We hope our windows survive. We are being shown kindness at every turn.

In May, the trial for the officers accused and charged (in various categories) in the death of Freddie Grey wound its way through the courts. Freddie had died a year prior in Baltimore following his arrest for allegedly possessing "an illegal switchblade". They had dragged him into the bus and he had suffered a severed spinal cord on the way into the precinct.There are the names that loom large in my mind-- Kendra James, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin. Philando Castile would die in July. Freddie Grey.

There are others, of course, many more.

Years ago, I was waiting for a friend to come over on her bike with her son. She arrived late and explained that some boys were fighting in front of the library and she had stopped to help one of them who was hurt. Someone else standing close by had called the police. As she leaned over the young teenager, a woman pulled up beside them both and quietly asked the child if he had any weapons on him. He handed her a small pocket knife and she hurriedly wiped it off and threw it in the bushes. My friend stopped. They helped the kid get up. She arrived at my house flustered and conflicted. Two summers ago, some kids we know were getting into it at the park. They started to fight. The park staff had called the police and another man had gone in and was trying to get in between them... shouting and putting his hands on them. Paul and I both started to quietly panic. I began scrolling through my phone to see if I had any of their mother's numbers. Paul ran straight into the middle of it and told them that he got that they were pissed, but that things were going to get much worse if they didn't get their asses home and FAST. They all started running in different directions.

People in Liberal Portland love to call the police over everything. My Next Door App is full of people chastising each other for not calling the police and filing a report on suspicious behavior sooner. I bet they love to call the police in your neighborhood, too. I used to think this was a good way to make sure everyone stayed safe. I used to hide behind my ignorance.

In May, Chance the Rapper released Coloring Book and I lost my mind with happiness and his Black Boy Joy. The kids rolled their eyes at me and worried as to why I learned all the words. Worried is a code word for being embarrassed.

****

My mom asked me what the kids might want for Christmas and I told her that Sam wanted a new Swiss Army Knife. He had lost his and had mentioned he might like another. I didn't hesitate. I did hesitate, however, as I was thinking how much J and J would also love a tiny knife to whittle away at sticks and carve up their erasers. You see where this is going. There are so many scenarios in which my kids might not get a second chance to: explain themselves, defend themselves, make amends, choose a different way.

We are on our second snow day this week and fourth for the year. Portland doesn't get very much snow and there are very few plows, the city doesn't salt, no one uses studded tires, and the warming and cooling trends, means that everything melts a little and freezes solid. It gets treacherous quickly. Yesterday, the boys were out making snowballs in the park and messing with their friends when an adult walked by and threatened them with a beating if they hit him-- accidentally or not. "I don't care if you're a kid", he said. And that's it, really. That guy is the same as our systems. They don't care if these are someone's kids. They don't care that these are my kids.

Safe to say that the kids have resigned themselves to knocking Nerf guns off of every and any wish list from now until forever.

****

So that was May. I turned the front lawn into garden beds. I tried straw bale gardening (trying to make the dirt while growing... it doesn't work, by the way. But I'll have a new, sweet bed next year). Track practice started up five nights a week. My sister and brother-in-law came to visit with their three kids and there was a mostly joyful reunion of cousins and practically cousins filling up all the spaces in our giant house. I thought a lot about Freddie Grey and I willed good thoughts to his mom. I hoped that the trials and the subsequent acquittals would not kill her.

I have to go back to Instagram to sort out what April was about. I was winding up two years of being PTA president for a experiment-as-school our district was conducting and about to dismantle. That stunk. Track Meet Saturdays started up. Sam turned 12. We decided to send him on a weekend trip with Paul. We are well connected in small ways which looked like: companion stand-by fares to San Francisco from a friend who is a pilot, a free place to stay in Oakland at a friend's apartment, access to a hardcore show that we might not have otherwise known about (Paul introducing his first born to his first love).

Sam has born the brunt of all our decisions (good and bad) the last 15 years. There are the average burdens of being the oldest child of siblings; of having parents who worked and went to school; of living in the relative hazard of constant home renovations... Of being the first to parents in their 20s who were bad at making plans outside of the day-to-day living you have to do when you're just getting by. Then there are the smaller ways that resentment creeps in... a family who looks out of the ordinary; having to often hear "no" when things or experiences have a higher cost-per-capita (both emotionally or financially) than we could take on; experiencing embarrassment when one or both of his parents advocacy around education, social justice, etc., affects the way he is treated. There are also the good things-- the life affirming things-- and the things that money can not possibly buy him that he has been privy to because of who his family is.

In many ways Paul and I struggle with similar impacts to our family life. I think that folks assume that I am the driving force behind this circus-- that Paul is some kind of suffering hero behind the scenes. Folks would be wrong. He is certainly our hero, but our life is not heroic and our choices fall somewhere between what's best and what's right and what won't kill us. Sam sees that, I think. In all of our bumbling he sees the suffering of the world and he knows where he's got to let the light in. He's also in Middle School, which is its own adventure fraught with injustice and hormones and more often than not, we drive him to the moon with frustration. So, they went to San Francisco and saw all the stuff you see in SF when you are 12 and on vacation.

****

We started seeing a family therapist this year. We take one of our kids often and then Paul and I see him separately to talk through what's working/what's not working. One of the things he asked us to do first was to define our family values in a way that our kids would be able to repeat back to us when asked. As things come up, we can frame our decision making for them using our family values as a rubric. So. Safety. Security. Compassion. Respect. Education and homework fall under (future) Security. Looking after our bodies falls under Safety. Educating ourselves about anti-racism falls under Compassion, Safety and Security. Not acting like a jerk falls under all of them. You get the idea. For some of our kids, we are teaching them to move around in a world that was not built for their edification. For Sam, we are showing him when he needs to speak up and when he needs to get out of the way. Where we fail at always modeling this, we hold onto the hope that all of the talking will take hold somewhere deep inside of all of our kids.

I also started affirmations with the little boys in the morning before they leave for school. They HATE it. They hate looking in my eyes and repeating "I am loved, I am valuable, I am trustworthy, I am kind, I AM WISE." But they do it. And in a year with fewer cuddles, and more conflict and frustration, their hugs are increasingly getting tighter. They hold on as hard as I'm holding on to the hope that they hear all the words that matter and forget the words that don't.

I know really good story tellers. One of them, David, introduced me to Lea Thau via email three years ago. He has always been one of my biggest champions and felt like I had a story to tell that she might be interested in. It took a year to get in touch. And then another year to nail down a phone date. Two months later, she flew into Portland to spend the weekend with us. Her co-producer Laura followed a month later landing a few days before Christmas. We were moving into a house that needed a bunch of work, Paul had just started a new job working from home, we were only a few months into the Framily Experiment... and we were a total mess.

I texted her this fall to say that I had been thinking about her visit last winter and I wanted her to know that we were not nearly the disasters that we were a year ago. For instance, I DO NOT CRY ALL THE TIME. We have furniture. We have a handle on the sibling wars. When I say "hey, we are all watching the same movie", everyone gets on board and claims their blanket. We are making plans but are no longer tied up in anything like The Big Plan. This is what it is right in this moment. When something changes, we will reassess.

What you should know about Lea is that she is kind and she is relentless. She does not settle for all of my I-Don't-Knows nor does she seem particularly fixated on closure or tidy endings. Three years ago we did not have this story to tell. Three years from now it's going to be something altogether different. Her well of empathy, compassion and endless curiosity is a gift to so many.

****

I listened to the episode this afternoon. I was worried I would sound delusional or uneven. There are one or two things that might not be totally accurate... If you were to ask me why we got pregnant again, I would tell you that my hormones literally took over my good sense and that Baby Fever is not to be trifled with. We didn't pick either of the boys up from the hospital-- the real story on the pick up of both boys sounds much more far-fetched in real life. Listening to myself parent on tape is mortifying. Listening to my own voice is mortifying. Still. Those things do not matter. J's honest and brave retelling of parts of her story matter. This documentation of our life during that time matters.

And of course, Lea gets to the heart of things better than I had dreamed she would. We went back and forth for more than two hours one night about motivation, adoption, and race and more than anything, I worried that we did not communicate effectively or with enough conviction our complicated feelings around all of it. But, it didn't matter, because she distilled it all, the way she does, better than we could have on our own. Everyone needs a good editor in their lives.

If you do not already listen to Strangers, here are three of my favourite episodes. Oh, and these might make you cry. I'm not saying they WILL but they might. There are plenty of funny ones, just not these:

March is My Month. Daffodils come up (the sisters excelled at bulb placement). The weather is completely unpredictable (exciting!). I start big plans for outside living (that never quite come to fruition). Track and Field starts for the Framily. 2016 would be our second year of devoting all of Spring and half of summer to water bottles, running spikes and Saturdays baking in the sun/getting soaked to the skin watching the boys run, jump and throw their way to the USATF Junior Olympics. In 2016, two of the boys would make it.

Track was one way we decided to expand our circle two years ago. We joined a club that had been dormant for a few years and was starting back up again. August has always been a fast runner and we figured this would be a good outlet. Sam did not want to be left out and so he joined up during the first practice. In March, all five boys registered. What the club lacked in organization they made up for in dedicated coaching and trial-by-fire competition standards. The coaching staff and most of the team are Black. Most of my kids are Black. Yes Please and Thank You.

(Way to make it about Race again, Melissa)

Here is the thing: when you get ready to adopt a kid that is a different colour than you, most good agencies will take you through a life checklist to see if you're preparing yourself in ways you might not expect. "Do you have people in your circle that reflect the race/ethnicity of your child? Do you have access to culturally specific events/experiences that reflect your child's birth culture? What will you do to insure that your child is not isolated by race/ethnicity?" If you are answering No to these things you either need to change your life OR you have a giant ego and believe that your super power love will be enough to prepare your kid to be <whatever colour that is not white> in America. We had filled out that checklist with some trepidation and were pretty aware that we were going to have to make a conscious and concerted effort to be a part of communities where we might not fit. This would be harder and easier than we expected.

Choosing public school in our fairly diverse neighborhood was a no-brainer. Gentrification was just beginning to really take hold of our neighborhood right around the time Sam was born. By the time he started school, the demographic shift was obvious. Still. We didn't realize right away that while our (Black) kids were choosing to play with children who looked like them, parents segregated themselves, and as such, the kid relationships didn't extend past the bus ride home. If my kids were going to spend time with families who looked like them, Paul and I were going to have to do the uncomfortable work of proving ourselves trustworthy amongst black families. It was going to look like attending events where my kids fit but I didn't. It was going to look like a whole lot of side eye at Birthday Parties and BBQs where people politely wondered why I was showing up in Black Spaces. I was going to have to ask for play dates for my kids and drop them off at the door without hovering. I was going to have to chase down folks in parking lots asking for numbers while looking foolish.That's not to say that we didn't have great family friends or that my children weren't invited over to their classmate's homes. But it began to feel like they were the object of tokenism-- their proximity to whiteness (me) made them safe playmates for white children. My kids noticed. My kids had no choice when they diversified our family. And now they were inadvertently being asked to do the heavy lifting of diversifying others.

This was also going to look like me walking around like one big social gaff after another.

There are a higher-than-average number of kids of colour at their school who have been adopted by white parents. This is a great thing in so many ways. Our family is not anomalous. But it became clear that proximity to (a caregiver's) whiteness was the common denominator in social circles. It was certainly not malicious. I don't think it's even intentional. It just IS.

That is how systems that Center Whiteness are built, by the way. If you were wondering. And we are not here for that.

So. I chased down parents in parking lots and sent awkward texts. We joined track. And it was good. I said un-thinking things and I got my feelings hurt. I watched my kids live out their Best Selves under the direction of caring and compassionate authority figures. I deferred to their instruction.

I turned 39 and I made a list of all the ways in which my whiteness got in the way of living and then I stumbled forward making mistakes and asking for forgiveness around every corner.

I set up my sewing machine in February and tried to surround myself with familiar things and familiar feelings. Making things is a familiar feeling and I felt as though the creative part of my brain was atrophying at an alarming speed. My body, too. "If you don't use it, you lose it" and I had been using neither head nor feet in ways that felt significant. It was all emotional response and knee-jerk reaction. One of our children was having an increasingly difficult time controlling his impulses at home. I was worried that one day someone was going to tell us that it was what it looked like and I was (and still am) unprepared for any kind of diagnosis that fell outside "passing stage". I was knee deep in school stuff (again) and volunteering and advocating and feeling like things could probably only get better for our family and our community. I was wrong, of course, I usually am. The house was revealing its quirks. The world continued to rage with terrifyingly predictable injustice. Sewing helped, though, and what was more, buying things to aid with the sewing helped even more.

I listened to podcasts and sewed and ignored the laundry and dinner prep. I said awkward things to people that I care about and I worked to expand my circle and understand things that I previously had not paid much attention to. I adopted "I don't know" as a completely legitimate response to people asking for my opinion or curious to know about "our plan" now that we were parenting children that we had no claim to. In fact, "I don't know" became such a prominent and unsatisfactory part of my repertoire that it morphed into "to be honest, here's what I think I know, but I'm probably wrong". I bought tickets to take the big boys home for the summer.

****Yesterday, I found a large bin of fabric that had wedged under the basement stairs. If we were living in a fairy tale village this would qualify as "the magical cupboard beneath the stairs". As we are now living in an era where a racist, con man and failed real estate agent can become President, it is just a closet no one wants to mess with filled with things we should probably not hold onto. The bin is the last of the things to be unpacked from the move. I opened it up I laughed because there were ALL THE THINGS I had been scratching my head looking for. The stuff in this particular bin had not been seen since before we emptied our previous house into storage containers to make it "look like fewer people live here". And with ALL THE THINGS were a bunch of things that I had forgotten I owned and well-- if I sewed every day for hours for the next year, I would still be hard pressed to get through all the stacks. I need to work on clearing it all out and moving forward and making a plan. I'm going to hold on to the "I don't knows" because they are serving me well and frankly, people have fewer opinions about the whole situation by taking this route.

Today, the kids have a Snow Day and have spent the afternoon rolling around in the 1/2 inch the skies afforded. The oldest complained about the cold and the youngest had to be dragged in. It's raining ice now and I'm going to go fold laundry, find a place for the fabric still sitting in the middle of the living room, and put most of those things I don't know on hold until tomorrow.

Truly is sitting next to me on the couch. She had built a nest or maybe a horse with the couch cushions and the arm chair and in her attempt to get on top of it, she ran across the room and vigorously threw herself over the whole mess connecting her eye with the carved arm of the chair. As his her way, she quickly and quietly collapsed next to the coffee table, clutching her face and hoping no one noticed. Her little body started shaking and Paul picked her up and she started sobbing. She now has an ice pack that is uncomfortable and she keeps pulling it off and asking me to check if the bump is getting bigger. It is. She is no stranger to black eyes and bloody elbows in this house full of boys. She is also my daughter and I was accident prone (understatement).

***

Nearly a year ago she turned four. She wanted a party that included a cake, two friends, no singing, and absolutely no games of any kind. If we could also not call it a "party" that would be good. At around the same time she started making eye contact with the people she saw nearly every day. Sometimes she would even speak to them. The school counselor greeted her one morning (like she always did) and Truly launched into a complicated explanation of her weekend and that was sort of it. Her imaginary pals remained more or less constant companions: D'asha, Raina, Gaita and Pickle. Pickle was always getting very sick, being teased or, in a nasty accident with an alligator, being eaten and then springing back to life only to be hit by a car.

I don't think she'll every realize how big of a fan club she had in those early days of being tied to my side. The custodians, secretaries, and teachers all knew her by name and made sure to crouch down and say hello. They slipped her donuts and stuffed bears even as they were only acknowledged by extreme side eye. They ignored her constant chatter to me as I made copies or delivered Thursday food boxes.The cashiers at the grocery store stopped offering her stickers because she solemnly refused to take one. The grandmas in the Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Support Group greeted her like she was one of their own and all the crustiest middle school students knew that she was Sam's little sister. She cried (often) when people would talk to her--mostly men-- and I could not leave her line of sight, even if she knew I was still in the room.

Four was the year she turned it all on its head with her constant dancing and tiny, powerful voice. It was the year she begged for sleep overs and gave her grandpa a hug and slept almost the whole night (!) in her own bed. She started school. She learned to play chess. She learned all the words to very questionable hip hop songs. She moved through the world with beauty and light and saved us from falling into a pile of parenting defeat at the end of the day.

****

She's laying next to me now, resting her hurt eye on the pillow and watching me type while calling out letters she recognizes. In a minute she will fall asleep mid-sentence, right after she's asked for a drink of water and something else to eat. She's wearing hand-me-down pajamas from her brothers which were hand-me-down pajamas from Sally Imo in Korea. Paul will carry her to bed in the room across from ours and at about 3 in the morning she will find a way to squeeze her giant feet down in between the two of us in our bed.

We will sigh and try to make room and know that this will part will turn on its head soon, too.

We have a dog now. He was a terrible decision made with the best of intentions during the summer of 2015. He arrived right before J and J flew in from Miami. He was a rescue and damaged (join the club) and has his own brand of neurotic that is both largely unhelpful and occasionally endearing. Truly loves him with all of her heart. She has a best friend named Kendall, but he is close second. The three big boys take turns walking him twice a day. They often forget to feed him. He spends a lot of time sleeping under our bed or trying to sneak onto the couch. Every time we opened the front door for the first six months he would try to run away. He's very fast and has zero street sense. He also showed unpredictable aggression with other dogs and walking him was an ever loving nightmare. He dragged me down the sidewalk one morning while Paul was out of town (he was traveling a ton for work that summer and fall) during the first few weeks and I laughed while crying as the leash dug into my hands and people watched me from their cars.

He has since calmed down.

He came named. Sort of. When the woman dropped him off she asked us what we would name him and she seemed surprised that we would keep whatever was on the paperwork. "Cuts down on the inter-family negotiation." And, I mean, what better name for a plot hound/shepherd/pit mutt than after a Yugoslavian Revolutionary?

***

Thank you, so MUCH, for your warm welcome. Three posts in and the typos are rampant. I have not been writing on the side or working on secret projects or engaged in brand development. I have just been here, struggling to sort out this life and what I have to contribute to it. I'm circling around something that I haven't quite nailed down. I'll let you know. Thank you for being here.

I started 2016 with the covers pulled over my head. We had cancelled our New Year's Day Open House (the thing with the Mennonite donuts) due to the lack of cooktop and total emotional bankruptcy. I wanted to crawl in a hole and all my (6) kids wanted to do was fight and complain. On January 3rd it snowed.

The good news: the big boys were no longer sleeping in a laundry room. In fact, the Sister's house has 6 bedrooms which means that almost everyone shares with at least one person. Sam has the smallest bedroom on his own and Truly's room is split down the middle with the other side of it as a sewing room. There is a spare room with a tiny closet-turned-bathroom and 5 windows wrapped around the corner. Everyone has proper beds and doors that close. The boys have a bathroom with old linoleum that they often pee on when not paying attention and are forced to scrub down weekly on their own. The only time I go in there is to check on the latter.There is a yard, but more importantly a basketball court and a century old city park facing the house across the street. I can yell at them to come in from the front porch. There are so many closets.

The Sisters kept excellent care of the things they could control and ignored what they could not. They loved the colour pink and used it liberally on all the walls. We dubbed it a Holy Pink because the shade, while pale, was so piercing it took four coats of the good kind of Sherwin-Williams to cover it up. There is a project in every room. I lie. There are several projects in every room. We bought new appliances. After the initial rush of friends and contractors, we slowed to what we could manage mostly on our own. Our friend Cameron rebuilt the railing on the second floor. It had been knee high and now it stands at Sam's chest. I began to hang pictures in feverish earnest. Paul has an office in what the Sisters used as a Chapel. The Stained Glass window of the chalice is shrouded by a giant computer monitor.

There is a basement for the children and also for the occasional water intrusion and mildewed carpet. There is no garage or outside storage, so the back yard looks like a tent village for broken tools, our rusting BBQ, and Truly's fairy house trappings. The fireplace is out of commission until we can get someone to come service it (I'm not so stoked on fire anyway, so that's okay). The people that bought our blue house decided to stay where they were for a while longer and soon the rental listing pops up across my screen like an insult to our well-intentioned sale.

Everyone knows we moved. And they all know to where. They are so happy for us. They saw us bleeding out of the old house and literally jump for joy when they see us coming down the stairs of the new house. Our old neighbor, the Trimet driver, gets misty eyed when she grasps my hands and says, "this was supposed to be this way".

We are happy, too-- If happy looks like drawn faces and easy tears. It is all so good and all so hard.